An ‘ironic compromise’: feminist research in military institutions

Abstract

Research in critical military studies recognizes that processes of knowledge production are themselves political, with attendant debates focusing on the ethics of conducting research with military institutions. Arguing for the need to produce critical knowledge about these powerful institutions, recent work that employs ethnographic methods thus emphasizes the need to critically examine researcher location and the research process itself. This article contributes to these deliberations by examining feminist concerns around militarization in engaged research with/in military institutions. Drawing on original ethnographic reflections, which it places in dialogue with feminist accounts of conducting fieldwork with militaries, this article interrogates what the politics of such research are. Written from an anti-militarist stance, this analysis insists on the importance of attending to the micro-politics of both militarization and subversion in knowledge production. The article traces the workings of contradictory political forces at play in the ethnographic research process. It proposes thinking of these dynamics with the help of Homi K. Bhabha’s understanding of mimicry as ‘an ironic compromise’ as a guide for resisting militarized thinking in the research process.